


Worth Her Name

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Drabble Sequence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-16 22:15:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7286737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots from Tuuri's life in Saimaa and Keuruu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worth Her Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IdleLeaves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdleLeaves/gifts).



> I'd lie if I claimed hadn't gone _eee_ a little seeing your prompt, and loved the chance to have a look into Tuuri's fuzzy head. I hope that you enjoy it, too! ♥

**I.**

Saimaa is a dim memory on the whole, and full of boundaries for a non-immune: Tuuri remembers staring down at the palisades on the shore, and mist obscuring the far view across the water from their house on the hill, the islets that were just rocks pushing from the water, and pine trees that had crawled their roots into their crags. She remembers Taru on the pier, with a pot of red paint to cover up the names on the large board by its end. She remembers everyone's stern lectures that it was something that could always happen - far away. 

**II.**

But that's not all. She remembers that life, even with so many limits, was good. Playing in the black earth, planting seeds in spring and watching vegetables grow through the summer. Her mother's and aunt's sunburnt faces, smiling, and Lalli, wide-eyed and sucking on a pebble. That's one of her earliest memories. She remembers sauna, and Onni tapping a birch bundle on her back. She remembers screeching and diving naked into a pile of snow. She remembers the trail of the _Lumilintu_ across the water, returning from market with grandmother Taika and uncle Samu. She remembers blueberries and wild honey.

**III.**

She remembers the light from sunset reflecting in long and short flashes in the windows of a neighbouring settlement until she worked out there was a pattern by staring through her aunt Lemppa's binoculars and begging her to explain until she learned shining morse code by heart without mistakes, and could signal back each night with a lantern, and she'd catch herself tapping I-E-V-A and T-U-U-R-I and wondering if that was what it was like to have a friend who wasn't a cousin or a brother or related in some other way, as almost all of the villagers were, before. 

**IV.**

She doesn't remember how it all ended. It's a blank, dark stretch where memories should be, but they slip away like live fish through her fingers, and others pop up in place of what should be there. She remembers the stench of smoke, but her mind tells her it's _Ukon juhla_ and its midsummer bonfires. Some of the journey she remembers - Onni chanting runo after runo, sometimes together with Lalli's high-pitched boy-voice. She remembers the window-shields lifting, finally, and a wall and gate looming. Onni is asleep on the steering wheel when their old vessel pulls into safety.

**V.**

No one in Keuruu is related to them at all, apart from Taru who left Saimaa for a military career when Tuuri was so young that she barely recognizes the woman waving at her through her tears and the glass of the quarantine cell. She is quizzed intently on what happened, and only shakes her head. She hits the doctor who wants to take her blood, and feels horrible for being glad that the glass walls cancel out noise, so she can't listen to Onni's crying, and can bury her nose in a book so she won't have to look.

**VI.**

After, she makes do, because she has to, for Onni and Lalli's sakes. She makes do. Onni joins the military and does protective magic. All three of them fray at the seams. She learns that, even without the glass walls of quarantine, she can listen to Onni cry or scold her without hearing him. She wants their parents, but that only makes him cry harder. Lalli hisses, bites, stops talking altogether for a time, starts sleeping under his bed. She crawls into Onni's one night, and his hands crackle with magic before he jolts awake and chokes out an apology. 

**VII.**

They fray, and only just hang together. Onni is afraid of everything even in Keuruu, even himself. She learns that from the jut of his shoulders when he holds her, from the warnings, again and again and again, about the terrors that are scratching at the walls. How she needs to keep safe, he says, for her own good, but his eyes plead that it's for him instead. It's bad enough that Lalli starts scouting and comes home smelling of sharp disinfectant every morning, pulls out of school, moves into a sparse room in the barracks. Onni holds her tighter.

**VIII.**

It's years like that. Tuuri learns well - Icelandic, Swedish, record-keeping, mechanics, manipulation, sneaking, and the gratification of Onni's eyes staying calm through her white lies while she wolfs down every little bit of life she can. She hides enrollment forms for Finland's Academies and even the Reykjavík School of Skalds. She breathes more deeply when her boss at the garage, Laila, lets her drive a tractor she's repaired out onto the farm grounds. She's tempted to just keep driving and doesn't, but she climbs to the roof and standing on tiptoes she can just see the forest outside the walls.

**IX.**

Through it all fear - because she isn't immune and not even a mage and can't defend herself at all if the worst happens again - has long since turned as commonplace as breathing. Onni says all could be over in the fraction of a second, but in the end that's what makes her want to make life worth it, instead of sitting safe and pretty and completely empty. It lets her kiss Ieva when she comes to Keuruu the year Tuuri turns fourteen even though Lalli spies on them for Onni, lets her laugh, and lets her be ravenous for more. 

**X.**

Taru's offer comes in the wake of a nighttime alarm drill that Tuuri simply sleeps through until Onni shakes her awake and scolds her until long after the sirens have quieted. It leaves her more convinced than ever that she needs to get _out_ , away from his demands and the way he smothers her, away from the ghosts of her family and eleven years of walls. She's of age, with nothing to the name she signs onto the documents with a flourish. 

She'll take her lucky chance, and it will be worth it. She'll make it worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Kiraly for the beta! ♥ 
> 
> The title in connection with the final drabble is something of a pun, since Tuuri's name translates to _luck_ in the sense of "lucky chance", as opposed to Onni's, which means the same thing, but with the connotations of a blessed or lucky fortune. (If I've managed to bungle something about those meanings, Finnish speakers are welcome to correct me.)


End file.
